When will people stop writing negative stories of Marilyn?
As one of the most iconic and indelible stars in Hollywood history, it’s an understatement to say there will only be one Marilyn Monroe. Unfortunately for her, she was so popular that studio executives across town desperately tried to rustle up a pretender to the throne.
During her career, Monroe was one of the most famous faces on the planet. What often goes overlooked or unmentioned is that she was also a method actor, even if she didn’t quite nail the technique to a similar extent as some of the actors she studied with, which included Jane Fonda.
Not everyone masters the method, though, as Billy Wilder discovered when it took her 80 takes to recite a simple line of dialogue in Some Like It Hot. It wasn’t Monroe’s dramatic heft and natural talent for thespianism that made her a superstar, but that didn’t mean that the bigwigs in Tinseltown could simply create a blonde bombshell in her image and expect the same results.
Then again, it didn’t stop them from trying. Jayne Mansfield was immediately singled out as a competitor and heir apparent, with 20th Century Fox signing the actor to a six-year contract in 1956 specifically to position her as the studio’s version of Monroe, who’d recently delivered the most acclaimed performance of her career in the same year’s Bus Stop, with a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Actress – Musical or Comedy’ marking her first major awards season recognition.
Fox even began promoting Mansfield as “Marilyn Monroe king-sized” as if the intentions couldn’t be any more obvious, but there remained fundamental differences between the two that prevented her erstwhile replacement from reaching the same levels.
Monroe was a better actor who generated publicity wherever she went, regardless of what she was doing. In contrast, Mansfield was more limited as a performer who willingly gave up her privacy and transformed her personal and professional lives into an open book to add more shine to her star. They always had an underlying competitiveness, which saw the former contemplate taking legal action.
Everyone knew that Fox engineered Mansfield to become the 1B to Monroe’s 1A, but she couldn’t do anything about it when blonde bombshell actors were hardly an archetype that could be owned and sold as intellectual property.
When Lawrence Quirk interviewed Monroe, he opened up a can of worms when he mentioned Mansfield. “All she does is imitate me,” the star raged. “But her imitations are an insult to her as well as to myself. I know it’s supposed to be flattering to be imitated, but she does it so grossly, so vulgarly. I wish I had some legal means to sue her.”
Understandably, that begged the question about how Monroe could possibly drag Mansfield into the courtroom for ripping her off; she had an answer, albeit one that wouldn’t stand up under scrutiny in front of a judge: “For degrading the image I worked for years to construct.”
Far Out Magazine
